Tag Archives: Games and Gaming

Delightful Games to Play (Part 1)

Video games are a pretty huge part of my life. I endeavor to make them. I stream them, both for my monthly Future Proof Plays streams and some on my own. Gregory and I have a standing Saturday morning date to play something before the world begins its demands on our time. I also play quite a lot on my own, although admittedly more in depth than in breadth.

I’m often eager to fall in love with a game, especially a game that might land the two objectives I talk about in my Paradise Killer post. As a result, this list of kinda-sorta-okay-definitely-favorites is:

  1. Unsorted,
  2. Pretty biased towards recently-played games,
  3. Has no games I “appreciate”, but don’t actively enjoy playing, and
  4. Sometimes explicitly about the game design, but often about my own emotional reactions

Hot Blog Summer is all about hitting the damn publish button, so this is being split into (at least…) two parts so that each can stay a little meaty.

I’m going to try not to be spoilery here, but leave a comment if I fuck up.

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The Facts and the Truth are Not the Same – Paradise Killer Almost Gets There

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There’s a certain kind of game that I’ve become very into in the last few years. These are games that are investigative or explorations of knowledge and that bring one or two important things to the table:

  1. They’re definitely going to examine the broken-ass structures of the society they’re set in, and
  2. They might offer up a way to break, reshape, or recreate the society to be not-terrible.

The first gets me to play a game with gusto. The second makes the game perfect.

Paradise Killer is an outstanding game by Kaizen Game Works in which you play Lady Loves Dies, a disgraced immortal investigator let out of prison to determine who murdered the head of an immortal broken-ass oligarchy running a broken-ass pocket universe society in which humans are abducted from the real world and used as fodder to attempt to resurrect their old gods.

It’s one of my favorite games, period.

Much like the islands in the game, however, it is not perfect.

Beware, all ye who enter. Spoilers lie ahead, and this is a game with some real good revelations in it as you play. This doesn’t include anything from the 2022 expansion, which I haven’t played yet.

Continue reading The Facts and the Truth are Not the Same – Paradise Killer Almost Gets There →

Where am I?

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So… I’m writing again, and partaking in a little summer writing project (coined “Hot Blog Summer”) with my partner Dr. Lucy. Good gravy, folks, the amount of plugin clean-up I had to do to get this and my next post out is wild. 😅 While I’m editing my first meaty post, here’s how you can find me these days:

Mastodon

I’m over at irrsinn.life/@melissa, posting about Beat Saber, other games I’m playing, a bit of social justice stuff, and tech. Come chat with me there. I really don’t spend much time on Twitter these days aside from Future Proof Games work and folks I get push notifications for.

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Full-on Sprain

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So remember when I hurt my ankle the other Sunday? It stopped getting better and started getting worse.

Guess I shouldn’t have done those other two runs and the two yoga sessions that week.

Out of fear that I might have a small fracture situation, I went to urgent care yesterday. The initial read of the X-ray didn’t show a fracture, so we’re assuming it’s “just” a sprain at this point.

Ligaments are creepy.

Unfortunately, that means no running, no lower-body weight-lifting, no yoga for at least two weeks. Which is pants.

I’m in an aircast at the moment, and that feels so much better. It requires a bit of contortionism to keep my foot at waist-level at work, but I’m all about some pillows at home. Gives me more excuse to watch live Doom 2 and Borderlands 2 play/speedruns.

Terry, Vampire Chemist

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Sunday, I’ll be in a new table-top Vampire: the Requiem game, run by Greg.

*squee*!

I’ve been wanting to play table-top Vamp for years now. Our characters are fresh up from “death” (meaning no XP), and will be starting from something like our first meeting with the powers that run the city.

The early-game premise is that we’ll be restricted to a single large apartment building, with no pre-established blood sources, etc.

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